This book has a proper prologue, not like the two page introduction to the mad scientist in Awakening. However, it has no epilogue (I skimmed the book to see how many chapters I had to look forward to), so that’s still a bit of an issue for me. If you’re going to have one, you should have the other.
The prologue is from Azrael’s point of view. The character’s real name is Gabrielle “Gaby” Cody, but that’s a pseudo-clever symbolic name which is a pet peeve of mine, so I’ll be calling her Azrael. And now, back to your regularly scheduled snarking.
Again, we get no sense of setting here—the author is quite bad at descriptive writing—and no name for the town I’ve dubbed Sunnydale. I have the working theory that the city is Phoenix, Arizona, but in the absence of an author-approved name, it’s Sunnydale and will stay so. Azrael’s pacing back and forth in front of some unnamed “aged, blackened building,” for no reason we’re told, fretting over the state of her existence since she vanished from Morty Vance’s apartment building and Wesley Crucifix’s life. This character’s real name is Luther Cross (get it? The founder of Protestantism and the symbol of Christianity?), so same pet peeve and that’s what I’ll be calling him.
She does some Basil Expositioning about how bored she is, and how she never was bored when Wesley was around.
Until now she hadn’t realized how much…excitement he’d brought to her life. You’d think a paladin would have her hands full enough that a nosy cop bent on seduction would have been mostly an annoyance, perhaps even a threat.
No excitement in your life? I’d hesitate to speculate about the state of someone’s life when killing demons is boring. Wait a minute (remembering every demon fight in the first book)—never mind, scratch that.
Plus, if by “seduction,” you mean sexual harassment, sexual assault, and relentless psychological manipulation of you to break you to his will, I suppose you’re right. Oh, and the first tingling nethers you’ve ever felt in your life. Almost forgot that.
The implication in the last sentence was that she never found Wesley an annoyance or a threat, but she was constantly annoyed by him and in chapter six of the previous book decided to kill him because he was a threat to her. The author forgot about that once Azrael discovered the tingling nethers, but it did happen and I am going to remind readers of that. I’m just wondering at this point if all the psychological manipulation and the sexual assault (Wesley did sexually assault her in chapter 6) is going to fall down the same Memory Hole as KY Lady and the child abuse victim did. I’m going to have to do a lot of linking to past posts if Foster decided to do that.
And then her Stockholm syndrome kicks in and causes her to think this:
Instead, he’d been fucking wonderful. The most wonderful thing to ever happen in her miserable, cursed life.
Get used to her calling her life miserable. That’s the only word she knows to apply to it, and the author will no doubt insist on piling misery after misery on her so that we will theoretically feel sympathy for her martyred Mary Sue. We do have to keep in mind that the reason she left Wesley was that she was afraid he would arrest her for the NINE murders she committed in the first book and if he arrested her, she wouldn’t be free to kill people anymore. Yes, you read that right.
At this point I have to go on a bit of a tangent to clarify something. When demons are discussed above, their definition is something that I’ve found unique in urban fantasy (or paranormal romance, for that manner). The paranormal here is limited to demons, and a circumscribed form of demon at that. This may change in the second book, but in the first one Azrael stopped calling the individuals she was killing demons halfway through the first book and tried substituting inaccurate paranormal descriptions of them such as “discarnate,” “ghoul,” and “specter.” Then she has a little speech to Morty about how the demons she’s killing are people.
Here, demons are not spiritual beings or forces that attach themselves to a person and then attempt to possess them but are just people you might pass on the street that God doesn’t approve of for some reason. There’s no justification as to why one person is a demon and the next one isn’t.
I’ve already mentioned this in posts for the last book, but the only analogues for them are the demons in the movie Frailty, which is sort of Interview with the Vampire, but with a demon slayer instead of a vampire. That movie was better, because right up until the end the audience had the choice to believe there actually were demons or that the demon slayer was mentally unbalanced. In this series Azrael is presented as unequivocally correct in her murdering, so there’s no dramatic tension. Plus, in the last book, the only demons in the NINE murders she committed were elderly people with brain cancer who’d been subjected to torturous experimentation by a mad scientist/doctor. One of them couldn’t even get off the bed and she murdered him anyway because—as I’ve mentioned in the posts for the first book—she has a massive, throbbing lady boner for murder.
And…Wesley was wonderful? So he was wonderful when he mocked you for what he thought was your mental illness, mocked you after you’d been harassed by a group of drunk men? He was wonderful when he grabbed your breast against your will? He was wonderful when he half-manipulated, half-forced you to go on a date with him that you’d refused? He was wonderful when he got angry with you every single time the two of you were together? OK, that last one was something she didn’t necessarily know and is based on Wesley’s internal monologues about having to keep his irritation under control and his anger in check, so I’ll give her a pass on that. The final word is that Wesley is not wonderful and never was, but she is a pure untouched flower of a girl who had never even been kissed on the cheek or touched by a man before meeting Our Hero and doesn’t know what she has a right to expect in the way of decent behavior.
So anyway, she’s trying to distract herself by protecting street sex workers from…something. We aren’t told what. (I guess the writer must have been advised that the relentless contempt and slut-shaming of sex workers in the previous book might be something readers could find offensive, so now she’s protecting them instead of looking down her nose at them). Then this respectable-looking “kid” shows up and her hackles go up because he’s not scared of her/the surroundings/whatever and she reads him as having an evil aura (that’s one of the fifteen superpowers she pulled out of her ass in the previous book after explicitly stating in the first chapter that she had none) because it’s black, which I don’t think you could even see at night, “pickled with immorality, riddled with holes of depravity.”
So the young guy just got pulled out of a jar and was thrown at you? Does immorality taste like dill or bread-and-butter? And in the last book, she could smell immorality, not see it. Just a heads-up: the author’s fond of the word depravity. The last time she used it in the previous book with regard to a person was when Azrael murdered a child abuse victim who hadn’t made any threatening moves and had never hurt anyone physically in his life because she wanted to break the cycle of abuse. I am not joking here. That’s on page 141 of Servant: The Awakening.
Plus, we don’t know how old Vlasic Dill Guy is. Azrael’s twenty-one, so what’s a kid to her, considering she sounds like a middle-aged woman every time she speaks? She makes a remark about it not mattering whether he was ten or fifty, so I think closer to ten, maybe? Killing children isn’t something the author would let her do, though, as that might be a little too grimdark for her readers and not properly ladylike for her heroine.
Even though he hasn’t made any aggressive or threatening moves, she decides he’s “challenged her,” and she’s glad of it because at least she’ll stop being bored for a while. Just so you know, of the NINE murders she committed in the last book, the most threatening any of the victims got was one guy attacking her with a knife. Most of the others could barely move. I tell you that now so you’ll know what to expect.
And that’s the end of the prologue! Next time, chapter 1, in which Wesley finds Azrael on the first page (suspense? What’s that?), interferes in her fight with Vlasic Dill Guy, and they have some waterboarding-painful romantic dialogue, as usual.
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